THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE CONTEXT

THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE CONTEXT; On Whether To Warn, What Choice Is There?

By TODD S. PURDUM

Published: August 3, 2004

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2—
It is a quandary as old as Aesop and as fresh as the morning's news: When should a warning be issued, and how many warnings without either disaster or a confirmed defusing does it take to make even the worst threat seem somehow less urgent, or credible or real?

Almost every time the Bush administration has issued an elevated-threat warning over the last two years -- often as a result of menacing but imprecise intelligence -- it has faced such questions. Administration officials from the president on down say they have little choice, and they believe that such warnings have a deterrent, disruptive effect on plotting by Al Qaeda.

On Sunday, the secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, not only issued a public warning for financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington, but also took the unusual step of conducting a conference call with network anchors and newspaper editors to alert them that the warning was coming.

As he had before, Mr. Ridge pledged increased vigilance, then urged even those workers most directly affected by the threat to say, ''Well, we know what you know, and we're going to go about leading our lives.''

But how?

''In a society such as ours is becoming, it is intolerable that officials might know about an impending attack and not make this knowledge public,'' said Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at the University of Texas who is an expert on international security affairs. ''On the other hand, it hands the terrorists a costless if minor victory by terrorizing the population. If officials try to minimize that impact -- 'Go on about your business, etc.' -- they dilute the effectiveness of the announcement and encourage a complacency they were trying to pierce with the announcement in the first place.''

President Bush himself was emphatic, telling reporters in the Rose Garden on Monday: ''We have an obligation. When we find out something, we got to share it. And what we're talking about here is a very serious matter based upon sound intelligence. And I would hope the people affected in New York realize that by sharing intelligence, we can better prepare in case something were to happen.

''In other words, if we were just silent on the subject, I think people would be a lot more nervous.''

Would they?

Mr. Ridge has raised the color-coded threat level from yellow to orange on five previous occasions, often as a result of threats that were relatively specific as to time but not to place. Previous confidential warnings to local law enforcement agencies alerting them to possible attacks on specific sites, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Sears Tower in Chicago, have leaked out, sometimes prompting more confusion than clarity.

Just last month, Mr. Ridge endured some criticism for announcing that the nation faced a heightened threat from Al Qaeda in the period leading up to the fall election while also saying there was not enough detailed information to warrant increasing the official threat level.

On Sunday, Mr. Ridge did raise it, with a public notice unlike any that had come before. He warned of threats against specific buildings in at least three cities, yet offered no real sense of whether active plots were under way or when such attacks might be planned, beyond ''the period leading up to our national elections.''

One obvious goal of such warnings is to prompt increased vigilance by everyone from top law enforcement officials to everyday civilians. Such vigilance has paid off in the past. A plot to bomb Los Angeles during the millennium celebrations may well have been foiled by a single alert customs agent who spotted a suspiciously nervous Algerian named Ahmed Ressam trying to cross the Canadian border at a remote ferry terminal in Washington State.

''The general approach of empowering millions of people by putting them on the lookout is no doubt a good one,'' Professor Bobbitt said.

Another goal is to shake up Al Qaeda, by making plotters aware that the government is watching.

''If anything, what this kind of thing does is cause disarray within Al Qaeda,'' said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies here. ''Nobody in Al Qaeda knows who said what, or how much, or how deeply they're penetrated. This basically creates disruption.''

But does repetition of such alerts run the risk of producing ''warning fatigue''?

''I think there may be a dulling effect,'' Mr. Cordesman said. ''But the alternative is not to stop issuing warnings and wait for people to be killed.''

Mr. Ridge's spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said that the secretary informed Mr. Bush about 10 a.m. Sunday of his intention to issue the elevated warning and that there had been no debate or second-guessing by the White House.

''The intelligence in this case was very specific,'' Mr. Roehrkasse said. ''The president and the secretary have said when we have this level of specificity, we will be able to come out with an elevated warning.''

Mr. Roehrkasse said Mr. Ridge had taken pains to reach out to the television anchors and newspaper editors because ''he has developed relationships with some of the anchors'' and they had asked him to try to give them some context when he got specific intelligence.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, a veteran of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a former mayor of San Francisco, said she favored the broadest possible warnings about specific threats. She said secret warnings to states and localities would seep out anyway, creating confusion and recriminations.

''This is a Hobson's choice,'' Ms. Feinstein said in a telephone interview. ''If you don't warn people and something happens, and you knew about it, you have a real problem. The other thing is by warning people and causing them to be alert, you may very well pick up somebody who has been skulking in a doorway around the World Bank or the stock exchange. We're all in this in one boat, and we recognize that in the world of terror, it can happen to anybody, anywhere.''

Photo: An officer checked identification yesterday at the doors of the World Bank, cited as a likely terror target. (Photo by Mannie Garcia/Reuters)